Museum Sound Design

In the 1970s, invited by the exhibition designer John Sunderland to provide a
soundscape for the new Jorvik Viking Centre museum in York. This was one of the
first museums to attempt to combine modern multi-media techniques with historically
authentic reconstruction, and was praised by the director of the British Museum
for its intelligent use of sound.

The museum used 52 tracks of audio distributed on 13
separate playback machines with loop-times of different lengths, ensuring that the
soundscape as a whole was constantly changing. The language of Jorvik (tenth century
viking York) was Old Norse and, as this is now a dead langage, had to be reconstructed
with the help of leading experts in the field.

The natural sounds in the environment
had to be consistent with the evidence of environmental archaeology at the site,
and the music (of which no substantial evidence remains) reconstructed by
intelligent guesswork. The entry passage to the main exhibit used excerpts of music and of
spoken language from the intervening ten centuries.

Trevor Wishart's original sound environment was eventually replaced in 2010.